Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

A spokeswoman for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) confirmed that the broadcaster is in negotiations with YouTube (GOOG) to offer its programming on the site. She added that they are looking at a variety of options, but there is no agreement in place yet.

The international arm of the BBC is called BBC World, and is broadcast in 200 countries. In many of those countries it is the No. 1 watched foreign network. Some American networks have already made deals with YouTube; specifically CBS (CBS) and NBC (GE).

Others are in the middle of negotiating deals, including Warner Bros. Entertainment (TWX), NBC Universal and 20th Century Fox (NWS). One part of the negotiations is that YouTube put filtering mechanisms in place to keep copyrighted material from even being able to be uploaded to the site.

While online video advertising is still in its infancy, it is still projected to take in over $1 billion in 2008. With a large portion of that coming out of television advertising budgets, it is putting the pressure on the industry to make a decision on whether to compete with video web sites or work with them. The decision has to be made quickly.

How I see this for online marketers is that it's something that needs to be taken a good look at to see how it will fit into our overall strategies. It is no all-encompassing answer, but simply another piece of the marketing puzzle that we need to learn to master. Video advertising will take longer to take off than banner, text and other forms of static marketing.